How Much Smaller The Large Places Are

The Lesson You've Got To Learn Is The Someday You'll Someday Stagger To, Blinking In Cold Light, All Tears Shed, Ready To Poke Your Bovine Head In The Yoke They've Shaped. Everyone Learns This. Born, Everyone Breathes, Pays Tax, Plants Dead And Hurts Galore. There's Grief Enough For Each. My Mother Learned By Moving Man To Man, Outlived Them All. The Parched Earth's Bare (once She Leaves It) Of Any Who Watched The Instants I Trod It. Other Than Myself, Of Course. I've Made A Study Of Bearing And Forbearance. Everyone Does, It Turns Out, And Note Those Faces Passing By: Not One's A God.

Most Great Writers Suffer And Have No Idea How Good They Are. Most Bad Writers Are Very Confident. Be Willing To Be A Child And Be The Lilliputian In The World Of Gulliver, The Bat Girl In Yankee Stadium. That’s A More Fruitful Way To Be.

We Are In The Grip Of Some Big Machine Grinding Us Along. The Force Of It Simplifies Everything. A Weird Calm Settled Over Me From Inside Out. What Is About To Happen Has Stood In Line To Happen. All The Roads Out Of That Instant Have Been Closed, One By One.

Reading Is Socially Accepted Disassociation. You Flip A Switch And You’re Not There Anymore. It’s Better Than Heroin. More Effective And Cheaper And Legal.

Such A Small, Pure Object A Poem Could Be, Made Of Nothing But Air A Tiny String Of Letters, Maybe Small Enough To Fit In The Palm Of Your Hand. But It Could Blow Everybody's Head Off.